© Reuters
Investing.com – Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou, cryptocurrency specialist at JPMorgan (NYSE:), recently examined the effect that the release of the Hinman documents, a series of internal discussions and emails the SEC had before the 2018 speech by the SEC. former SEC official Willian Hinman, will have on the future regulation of cryptocurrencies.
In a Friday post on LinkedIn, Panigirtzoglou opined that the speech will influence how cryptocurrency regulation will eventually be conducted by the U.S. Congress “in such a way that ethereum avoids being named as a security.”
“Senior SEC officials did not believe ether was a security in 2018… SEC officials had reservations about Hinman’s inclusion of a direct statement about ether in his speech, because “it would be difficult for the agency to take a different position on ether in the future,” he wrote.
He further pointed to one of Mr. Hinman’s statements – which states that “if the network on which the token or coin is to operate is sufficiently decentralized, the assets may not represent an investment contract”, which explains why the SEC refrained from acting against ethereum when it targeted other cryptos, including XRP.
The analyst thus assumed that ethereum could be placed in the same category as the to be regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as a commodity, while specifying that “sufficiently decentralized” assets could meanwhile be placed in another category which “would imply more restrictions and protections for investors than currently envisaged for commodities, but less than required for securities”.
Finally Panigirtzoglou opined that in any case, the Hinman documents will be a catalyst for bringing more decentralization to the crypto space, as they would “likely intensify the race between major cryptos and their respective blockchains to become more decentralized and look even more like to ethereum in order to avoid being referred to as securities.”